Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Sen. Chris Dodd (D.-CT), is one of the biggest embarrassments in the United States Senate – and that covers a lot of territory. He is an even bigger embarrassment if you are a Catholic.

Never mind his fingerprints being all over the whole sub-prime lending disaster. Or his own questionable loan from one of the firms his senate committee was supposed to be regulating. Now this grand master of mellifluous mental confusion is moving on to creating a brave new world of health care.

Consider his statements about mandating abortion coverage and federal funding in the health care bill :

“We like the idea that people have choices and, indeed, the law of the land permits people to make those choices, and we respect that, and we are going to pursue that,” Dodd told CNSNews.com last week when asked about abortion funding in the bill. “Again, we do not want to discriminate when people have--they have convictions, moral convictions and religious convictions.”

Here the great Dodd tells us that not only is abortion a legal right – it may even be an act of piety, a religious conviction no less, and we cannot discriminate against people’s practice of their religion.

Some religion. Some convictions.

And since when do Democrats favor funding people’s practice of religion? Obviously it is hard to respond logically to the illogic of Sen. Dodd’s sophistic hit and run rhetoric.

But the real question is, what is Sen. Dodd’s own religion and what are his moral convictions? They are not Catholic. Is it too late for someone in authority in the Church to tell him that and ask him to either inform his conscience, leave, or be expelled? As it is, he brings grave disrepute on the Church and its members in Connecticut by claiming there is a legitimate religious right to abortion that must be enshrined in American law.

A number of years ago a priest in Connecticut submitted his immediate request for retirement rather than continue in a parish in which the disreputable Dodd was being honored.As St. Augustine said, what we tolerate we soon emulate, and this priest chose not to tolerate this. The question those in authority in the church need to now ask is, how many other Catholics are they allowing Sen. Dodd to take over the cliff with him?

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

"In 1996 she [Dr. Angela Lanfranchi] read a metanalysis of the relevant studies by Joel Brind, Ph.D., a biology professor at Baruch College in New York, who had put the pieces together. According to his article, the first study that showed a link between breast cancer and abortion had been published when Brind and Lanfranchi were children. It appeared in 1957 in the prominent English-language Japanese Journal of Cancer Research. Japan was one of the few places where abortion was legal in those days (importantly, for abortion/breast-cancer link activists, Denmark was another). The study found that breast-cancer patients were three times more likely to have had abortions than the general population. If abortion was a contributor to breast cancer elsewhere, it went unreported. At that time, though abortion was becoming prevalent in the West, it wasn't mentioned in polite society or on medical charts."

But Sarah Palin isn’t a quitter. I know this because, well, because just last night I read her interview in Runner’s World. Sample quote (noting that she is, to my knowledge, the only political figure who is consistently quoted phonetically: (RW)"What about in a race? Could you beat the president?
(SP)"I betcha I'd have more endurance. My one claim to fame in my own little internal running circle is a sub-four marathon. It wasn't necessarily a good running time, but it proves I have the endurance within me to at least gut it out and that is something. If you ever talk to my old coaches, they'd tell you, too. What I lacked in physical strength or skill I made up for in determination and endurance. So if it were a long race that required a lot of endurance, I'd win.”